1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a monitoring system and method, program, and recording medium, applied to surveillance cameras and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, monitoring systems have been used to monitor situations over wide ranges. Examples of monitoring systems are used to monitor marine and river areas, off-limit areas, observation of animal behaviors, and so forth. Such monitoring systems take images over a wide range, and accordingly video cameras with an extremely great number of pixels have been used. This has resulted in increased costs of the system.
An alternative arrangement has been proposed, wherein the photography range of the camera is shifted in order while taking still images, and a great number of still images are linked so as to generate an image of a range to be monitored. In this case, the linked image generated by linking a great number of still images can be formed as an extremely high resolution image. Accordingly, in the event of enlarging a part of the linked image, the resolution of the enlarged image itself is high, so clear images can be obtained for enlarged images as well.
An extremely wide range of motion is required for the cameras, such as 180° or 360°, due to the need to have a wide range of monitoring. The direction of photography of the camera is switched over this wide range, still images are obtained in each direction of photography, and a panorama-like linked image is formed.
The wider the range of photography is, the greater the number of still images making up the wide-range still image, meaning that the time required for obtaining the image becomes longer, resulting in the problem of longer cycles for obtaining a linked image. However, the area regarding which monitoring is desired is actually often much more restricted.
Accordingly, the present assignee has proposed in Japanese Patent Application No. 2002-130761 a system wherein areas in a wide range are cropped per field angle, images of the cropped field angles are acquired with normal image-taking devices, and the acquired images are combined to obtain a highly-fine and wide-range image.
However, even this system depended on moving the camera to take live pictures and confirming the taken pictures for determining the area which is actually to be monitored. Also, there was no way therein to notify the user at a glance regarding the relation between the range over which images can be taken in and the photography range.
Moreover, even areas to be monitored in further detail are taken as multiple images, so a certain amount of time is required to photograph those portions again, and accordingly, such portions cannot be monitored at time spans shorter than the certain amount of time.